CHAPTER SEVEN
Married Love: Free, Total, Faithful, Fruitful
Objective: To present and explain the essential characteristics of marriage as a free, total, faithful and fruitful gift
of self between a man and woman.
Continuity with Theology of the Body for Teens: Middle School Edition
Chapter 7 focuses on the universal call to holiness, vocation as a response to God’s call, and the complementarity of
the vocations. This supplemental session further highlights the vocation to marriage as a beautiful path to holiness
by focusing on its fundamental qualities.
Key Concepts

Every vocation—single life, marriage, religious life, priesthood—is a call to love.

Marriage is an intimate community of life and love willed by God Himself.
 Marriage calls for a unity of two kinds of love with which God loves humanity— eros and agape, that is,
attraction/desire and self-giving/sacrifice. Just like God desires an intimate union with us and always
gives Himself for our good, so spouses are called to show both kinds of love toward each other.
 In marriage, God calls a man and woman to make a complete gift of themselves to one another with
these two kinds of love. This mutual gift of self is meant to be free, total, faithful and fruitful.
 The gift of self made by a man and woman in marriage must be free, not coerced or forced; it must be
total and without reservation, including all of the elements of the person; it must remain faithful and
exclusive until death, and it must be open to life.
 These characteristics are reflected in the questions that the bride and groom are asked to answer
during the wedding ceremony. “Have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to
one another in marriage? Will you love and honor each other as man and wife for the rest of your lives?
Will you accept children lovingly from God and bring them up according to the law of Christ and His
Church?”
 Marriage is characterized by unity and indissolubility. This means that marriage is constituted by a
total, mutual gift of self between one man and one woman for life.
 The indissolubility of marriage is rooted in the total, personal self-giving of spouses and is required for
the good of the children. Indissolubility is also a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful
love that God has for humanity and that Christ has for his Bride, the Church.
 Sexual intercourse is intended by God to be the most intimate sign of the complete gift of self that a
man and woman make to one another in marriage. The mutual gift of self is not meant to remain closed in
on itself, but rather, makes the spouses capable of the greatest possible gift—becoming cooperators with
God in giving life to a new human person.
 Sexual intercourse has twin meanings or purposes in God’s plan that are joined together, like two side
of the same coin. We must respect the inseparable connection between love-giving and life-giving that God
has inscribed in the gift of sexual intercourse.

God calls spouses to a free, generous and responsible cooperation in transmitting the gift of human life.
 Contraception refers to any action that suppresses the life-giving potential of sexual intercourse. It
contradicts that meaning of sex as a sign of total self-giving because it withholds the gift of fertility from
one’s spouse, and is morally wrong.
 When procreation is not possible, married life does not lose its value, but becomes the occasion for
spouses to practice spiritual parenthood in service to the human person in other life-giving ways.
 Sometimes what appeared to be a marriage is lacking one of its essential elements, and so is not a valid
marriage in the eyes of God. Through its annulment process, the Church offers assistance to those who are
divorced to determine whether or not they were validly married.